24/48, Kelly Days, and Overtime: Making Sense of Firefighter Pay

May 25, 2026

Educational and personal-organization tool only — not legal, financial, or labor advice, and not affiliated with any department or union. Confirm specifics with your union and department policy.

Ask someone with a normal job what they worked last week and they'll say "forty hours." Ask a firefighter and you'll get a cycle, a shift letter, and a story about a hold-over. The fire service runs on schedules built around 24-hour shifts, and that structure ripples straight into how pay and overtime are calculated.

The shift cycles

Most departments run some version of a multi-day rotation — a 24-hour shift followed by 48 hours off (the classic "24/48"), or longer cycles like 48/96. The appeal is obvious: long blocks off between shifts. The complication is that a "week" stops being a useful unit. Your hours are better understood across the full cycle than any single calendar week.

What a Kelly day is doing there

Because those shift cycles can push average weekly hours above the standard, many departments use Kelly days — scheduled days off built into the rotation to bring average hours back down and control overtime. If you don't track where your Kelly days fall, it's easy to lose sight of what your actual scheduled hours are in a given pay period.

FLSA work periods: why firefighters are special

Federal overtime law has a specific carve-out for fire protection employees, often called the 7(k) exemption. Instead of a 40-hour week, departments can set a work period of up to 28 days, with overtime kicking in only after a higher threshold of hours within that period. The practical effect: your overtime math doesn't look like a normal job's, and the threshold depends on how your department defines its work period.

Why your own log beats trusting the system

Between trades, hold-overs, overtime shifts, and Kelly days, a firefighter's hours in a given period can get genuinely complicated. Tracking them yourself — shift by shift — means you can sanity-check a paycheck, confirm an overtime shift was credited, and have a record if something looks off. The department's system is usually right, but "usually" isn't a reason to stop watching your own numbers.

Keep it close, keep it private

Your schedule and pay are personal. A tool that lives on your phone, works offline at 3 a.m. in the bunk room, and never ships your data anywhere fits the job better than anything that needs an account and a signal.

General principles of fire-service scheduling and FLSA §207(k) work periods; confirm your department's specific cycle, MOU, and overtime rules with your union.